


The Mapmaker's Son

by epanistamai



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 23:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4584033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epanistamai/pseuds/epanistamai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The mapmaker plots the course and charts the land but it is his son who must trace all paths back home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mapmaker's Son

**Author's Note:**

> Self-indulgent feelings about CATWS and also just toying with the idea of what if bucky did remember everything and what that would entail for him.

    His mind is like all deep and dark things, rotting undergrowth made for strewing bread crumbs to yet darker parts. The soldier knows the breadth of his mind as sure as he knows he is only half the man Steven Grant Rogers wishes him to be. He knows the man is searching for Barnes, Barnes who is his other half, the one the crumbs lead to.  He is who the soldier is protecting, who the soldier has protected for how long maybe his whole life since every memory he has is tinged with Barnes. He thinks of Barnes putting the body before Steve's frail one and he thinks feels wants to believe he is doing the same to put his conscience before Barnes's.

    It is that brute animal pain simply drove Barnes deep underground _it had to_ and brought out the soldier who would be there when the Master Zola _that pig fucker_ calls for him and he always does (even Natalka does not defend his second hidden true self as though she had never seen him as a whole) so that he cannot correct them. He can not even begin to find words that would explain how he knows. How could his bones have forgotten the curve of Steve's back etched into them, the way Steve's eyes narrowed against harsh sunlight through their Brooklyn apartment, the way his mouth curved around the French he had learned. When his chest gets like he can't breath and he squeezes his metal wrist as though he could still feel bones shift beneath it and all he can see is blonde hair, he knows Barnes is coming out, taking back each little bread crumb and turning it into something living and pulsing.

    A street in Ukraine any street and he sees blood pooled around eggshell limbs, climbing like ivy up fine gold strands and he sees all this red white and blue like a flag and he knows its Barnes who feels lost from within him, missing something that the soldier does not own. It is also Barnes who allows the soldier to run into Ilya Basarov many years later with only a scar on his still pale arm, the sins of his father a distant memory. And this fear, this terror of failing a mission that he might never see the end of, he knows he can't slip up. Sometime he had been tasked this, to keep this tremendous secret that he is not all gun but only half a weapon and half a bleeding out man and some times, when he's been out of ice for days the weight of it all will make him stop and sit down and let himself be overwhelmed by Barnes's memories, his quiet and desperate gasps the only sound he can make. Or perhaps it is Barnes being overwhelmed by the soldier's memories because he must save every scrap he doesn't know how to stop. He doesn't know why his memories must be saved as well, folded and tucked away carefully after his handlers have scanned over it and given it back.

Barnes thinks that Steve would be horrified, that Steve is not like them and he wouldn't understand and the soldier must never tell Steve about his memories. Perhaps he would force the soldier back into the dark crevices and pretend that he had never existed, or could he cut him out (this body never was his to begin with). But still he catalogues them and hides them away because he knows something about wanting, now.

.

.

    The waitress in Lockerbie is blonde and chipper and she flirts with him as she slides his plate across the table. He, in turn, feels Barnes swell with the need to return with something a smile a wink and friendly nod _just something to show a little of me in here, yeah?_ And he can't, he can't let that happen he has fought too hard to keep this marionette together and unbidden the Master's voice fills his head demanding to know what he is.

          Who are you who are you who are you what are you?

    _The weapon the follower the one who shapes the nations_

He has no space for anything else. He cannot. The waitress is gone now, the food cold, and there are five evenly spaces dents on the table. The soldier thinks he is satisfied.

.

.

    And when he is years (or maybe days) out of the first time, he meets a crimson and ivory girl whose limbs are all knobs and awkward angles but her grand jetes and arabesques are flawless (as is her aim) and he comes to her while she's standing next to the bleeding body of Sofya Romanovna and tells her that he is her senior handler. She simply regards him, quietly, then places the gun by her classmate's head before following him through the steel doors.

    It only takes a few hours for him to realize why they called her 'the prodigy'. The awkwardness leaves her as she spars, becoming one long blur of turns and twists and when the soldier lets her hit him, he feels genuine pain rather than a quick sting. After the spar, they both analyze the moves in a mix of German and French, both of which she is fluent and her eyes _are not blue but they_ are a shade of green that reminds him of fresh grass and warm bread slipped across the counter with a wink.

    The soldier thinks that maybe this is it, this is the repository where he'll place Bucky Barnes in all his glory for someone who can hold the memories and not sink under its weight. The next few weeks, he tells her, haltingly and with the large gaps from where Barnes is withholding memories, about Steve and about how he and a group of men fought bad men and that he was the sniper so he protected his friends from high above. It's all so simplistic and he hates every word coming out of his mouth because he knows the depth of the truth is not there, it can't come close to what he sees in his head but he can't find better words, some way to describe the feeling of flight only he's not flying but standing with a person who was his north, his east, his south, his west once, to a different man. Natalka is entertained. She thinks they are fairy tales or perhaps even just delusional rantings but she still stays and still listens and never breathes a word of what he says, or he can only believe that because he is allowed to continue training her even as the months go on with only minimal wipes to keep Barnes from creeping further and further into his trails until he does. He does, every night, until it is living agony, the expansion until every part of him burns with the coppery brightness of self-loathing and it only quiets when he digs his sharpened fingernails through his arm, scratching out his own compass because the soldier does not need Barnes's compass he does not need anything Barnes offers _but will no one take this cup from me?_

.

.

_All marks heal too fast for any of those motherfuckers to catch god let me feel this one thing._

.

.

.

.

.

    The next time he sees her, she no longer has the bangs or the awkwardness and he thinks of Barnes watching Steve who in turn is watching Margaret Carter and her red dress, that memory low in his gut. The fight is intense in that neither wants to return, victory or loss, so their bodies ricochet around the narrow cliff and that is a new thing she has lost, the awkwardness that scorned the final polish the academy should have given. _There once was a girl._

He tastes the blood that is slowly dripping from his lips. Finally it is _bagryanka_ who wins, slumping over and dwarfed by the dead man behind her, and the soldier who is left to dispose of the weapons and the body. But not _bagryanka_ 's. He leaves her slumped over, hidden by bushes and with her gun by her side. The soldier slips away and he does not know what happens to her.

.

.

.

.

    When he finally met the man it was as though the soldier were a matryoshka doll with every shell stripped away until only the tiny center that was all Barnes and barely soldier was left and the certainty of Barnes's feelings narrowing his vision until all he could see was him and that instant he would have. He doesn't know what he would have done, just that if the man (if Steve) had asked he would have but instead he ran and the next time, the soldier answered for the both of them.

    Who the hell is Bucky?

    Who creates the monsters in the soldier so that his own memories are marked with brightest silvery loathing, so that every death is inscribed in him. Who allows the soldier to scream for himself and to shed tears for the young president's body and yet there is also the warmth of a spring in a verdant park and the wild exhilaration of holding a thin body to his. Who without, he would not have known how to name the shiver the soldier feels when Pierce gently cups his face to lay a soft, soundless forehead kiss, a weak pale dazed impression of when Steve kissed Bucky's cheek for the first time. The soldier thought he could be happy with this until he and Steve fought and suddenly he _wanted_.

    Rather, Barnes wanted and for once, the soldier was helpless against the dark recesses of his mind, crawling out of the places that he had hidden them oh so carefully like opals and rubies and sapphires. He thinks _you touched me and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours_ a flight that is all Barnes because he has never read anything more than weapons field manuals yellowed and curled by countless other fingers.

_I feel but hunger and thirst for you._

    Is this what it is like to be a tree with roots that stretch far into the deep remains and he wouldn't know how to cut off the roots so that his own self, the soldier, can be free finally from bearing a history that is not his. Could he cut it out of him as he'd cut tumors and bullets, leaving the bleeding hunks for Steve to find, to take and to treasure in a way they deserved? Perhaps he would give Steve his fingers, his real fingers because he kills with his metal hand and Steve deserves the clean part of him the part that is still Barnes and will talk with Steve about the memories that the soldier cannot articulate but only mutely watch from within.

.

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    He thinks that there is no other place he would be than here in this small and decrepit motel room waiting for Steve to wake up and to see him. He is a sheet of touchpaper, a live grenade _you were radiant and resplendent_. The soldier watches the sun rise through the clouded window.

.

    Over a breakfast, where he carefully allows himself a small smile at the waitress (a bored looking teenager) they talk. The soldier never thought it would be a roadside diner but now that they are here and talking and Barnes is aching so that he feels his chest about to break open and then he wouldn't need to talk Steve would simply see all that he had in him red and pulsating. He could pick up the pieces and inspect each one for marks that the soldier left.

Steve murmurs about how this breakfast was a lot better than whatever they got from Mac Cooley's place down the street _where everything on earth is boiled three times and then served cold, Stevie_. He blinks at what he's revealed and smiles ruefully at the soldier so that he can see the open wound being sewed up before his very eyes, sealed against more vulnerabilities. But the soldier has seen already the weight behind a carefully light expression that will never fool him again. He has found the one who will carry Barnes's pieces out of him or perhaps he has come to vanquish the soldier and finally cast him out of this body o father I have committed willful murder and he cannot bring himself to fight anymore when Barnes forces his way to the front. He numbly stands by, retreating further into the dark spaces even as Barnes lunges out more and more and he hears his hoarse voice talk and talk and talk about every single memory because he needs to prove that he is still who Steve thinks he is.

The soldier wants to believe that, for Barnes and for himself. Dimly, he registers Steve's eyes widening the more he hears, the great flood of memories rushing back at him. He thinks of completion, of a circle finally closing. And then he thinks of nothing until he notices everything is quiet. Has Barnes run out of memories after decades of hoarding them and replaying them?  Is that it?

    “Tell me about after, Buck. About what the Soldier did.”

    No. He does not can not will not know about the soldier and Barnes has let slip and Steve has picked up with all his bulldog tenacity that everything is not the same as before it isn't the same old Bucky and all the soldier can do is retreat even further back. And why does Steve want to know? He doesn't know what he's asking for. He never does. Barnes gives a halting explanation of why Steve can't know and what the soldier is to Bucky and the way Steve said his name it was like a litany, a chant, a declaration. The soldier doesn't know what to do when even his name is given enough weight that he can only think of himself sinking through Barnes's body to his feet the burden of Steve's own need too much to bear.

And how could he have ever imagined Steve to be a passive bearer, a simple container for what he held when this man before him is demanding that he carry half his soul as well but how? Where could the soldier go so that Steve could settle in and not see the remnants of the soldier's touch, staining everything like red strands of Natalka's hair flying everywhere. And all he and Barnes, together, can choke out is that _they did it for him_ , it was all for him. It was all to get back to him and to show him that there was still a Barnes within this body. He would break himself in two for this man. Steve looks at him with something indescribable in his eyes, something that makes Barnes want to weep and he spreads his arms wide and they know an invitation when they see it. Bucky goes to him and the soldier follows.

.

.

And later when he is still enveloped in something that is more than just Steve's body, his arms, he rests his chin on Steve's shoulder and shifts himself so that Steve would be unable to turn his head, to look at his face.  He breathes in and let the almost comfortable silence go on for a few more seconds.

Finally, he starts with "Ilya Basarov was the son of a pakhan in Kiev..."

.

.

In the morning, he wakes up, the drag of his metal arm ripping the bed sheet and he wants to curl up in shame because this is Steve's bed and his kindness he has torn until his eyes see the glass of water by the bedside and the note tucked under it.

                  _“What do I know of love's austere and lonely offices?” - S"_ was all there was on the note.

.

.

    _What do I know?_


End file.
